You might want to check out "Hangul
Romanizations" page so that you can understand how I am writing
romanized Hangul on this site.

This will be a simple description of the written Korean language
(한글 HanGeul, or more commonly Hangul). Your
browser will need to be able to handle the EUC-KR character
set encoding and to display Korean fonts.

This is neither about the Korean language in general (i.e., how to
say "xxx" in Korean) nor about the representations of the Korean
language in computers and Internet (i.e., how to display a Korean site
on your computer). You may find a better reference in the resource page.

The Korean language existed long (don't quote me on this, but I think,
at least, there is a historical reference dating back to around 400
A.D.) before the writing system. Before (and long after) its
invention, almost all of writing was done with Chinese
characters (한자 HanJa). The influence of Chinese
characters can be seen everywhere in the modern Korean language and
society.

The Korean writing system is quite unique in that it was
invented, relatively recently, in 1443 by King
SeJong (세종대왕 SeJongDaeWang) and his scholars at
집현전 JipHyeonJeon. It was published three years later.
The system was originally known as 훈민정음 HunMinJeongEum,
which translates to "the proper sound for teaching people". The
name, Hangul (한글 HanGeul), is known to be coined by 주시경
Ju SiGyeong in 1913.

Before this document describing the writing system was discovered in
1930s (I was never good at History), no one knew what this system was
based on. Some claimed that King SeJong one day looked at his
"window" (before glass, thick papers were used to cover wooden frames
with geometric shapes) and came up with the idea.

However, the document describes the philosophical (i.e., 천지인
CheonJiIn / "heaven, earth and human") and physiological
(e.g., shapes and locations of mouth and tongue) bases for each
alphabet (자모 JaMo).

The exact purpose of this creation has been debated for a long time.
What King SeJong wrote initially about it is that the Korean
language and the Chinese language are different and it makes it
difficult for common people to express themselves well with Chinese
characters and that he created these characters so that they can be
easily learned and used everyday.

Its use didn't become popular overnight despite its ease of use. It
was still a time when China had great influences over Korea in every
aspect, so aristocrats and scholars kept using Hanja and despised its
use. If you wanted to get ahead in life (e.g., becoming a scholar or
landing a government position), one was required to learn HanJa. So,
Hangul was mostly used by women and people of lower classes. It
wasn't until recently, in the mid-20th century, that its use became
more prevalent among people.

I think the Hanja education in the secondary schools is continuing in
a way, but not much. Since the late 1980s, newspapers have started to
use only Hangul. It used to have mixture of Hangul and Hanja and I
remember that I often got reprimended for not being able to read
newspapers well (I wasn't good with Hanja).

These days, most of the printed media use Hangul exclusively. Some
did have come back to using both, especially for personal names. But
for the most of the younger Koreans, Hanja isn't such a big issue in
everyday life.

One last thing. Koreans used to celebrated October 9th as the Hangul
Day (한글날 HanGeulLal) nationally (that is, a national
holiday). But about a decade ago, they canceled it citing, if I
remember correctly, that we had too many holidays (whether that was
the real reason, I have no idea)! Anyway, it is no longer a
national holiday, but some do still remember.